The story skillfully walks the line between the supernatural and the simply strange. J’s garden begins to produce carrots that are shaped uncannily like human hands. J,” a tale about a writer who observes the unsettling behavior of her landlady, Mrs.

I was most impressed with the story “Old Mrs. A woman whose husband is having an affair accidentally stumbles upon the dying moments of a pet Bengal tiger, and takes comfort in stroking the tiger’s fur during its last breath. Two elderly women build a museum that displays used implements of torture. A mother continues to buy her deceased son strawberry shortcakes for his birthday years after the child suffocated to death in an abandoned refrigerator. She draws attention to the missing details, illuminating the hidden sadness, anger, and violence that lurk in the corners of daily life. “The sky was a cloudless dome of sunlight…Everything seemed to glimmer with a faint luminescence: the roof of the ice-cream stand, the faucet on a drinking fountain, the eyes of a stray cat, even the base of the clock tower covered with pigeon droppings…You could gaze at this perfect picture all day…and perhaps never notice a single detail out of place, or missing.”įrom here, Ogawa makes a habit of uncovering the undercurrent of strangeness and imperfection that runs beneath seemingly unremarkable and familiar scenes. “It was a beautiful Sunday,” the first story begins.

Her narratives are engrossing, twisting into unpredictable and peculiar shapes, and her prose is swift, unadorned, and powerful. Ogawa drags these disturbing subjects into the light, prying into her characters’ most private fears and desires. Instead, these eleven linked tales are “dark” because they are primarily concerned with those things that are traditionally kept out of the light: grief, tragedy, the desire to harm others, death, mental illness, alienation, obsession, failure, loss. The stories in Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales are not horror stories, as the front cover and the title of this collection might suggest.

Revenge yoko ogawa review